After a long hiatus (sorry), here once again are some notes
on the texts for our upcoming concerts. As usual, take everything
here with a pinch of salt; corrections and suggestions will be
gratefully accepted.

Some of what I’ve written will be obvious to you; some may be
obviously wrong; I hope there’s some space between these extremes.

Translations are mine, and are every bit as reliable as everything
else in here. I have generally chosen precision over clarity, and
clarity over elegance; if you want translations
fit for inclusion in programme notes or something, please do not
use these: either look elsewhere, or ask me for better ones.

For the items we’re singing from M&P,
the notes in the back are worth a look.

I haven’t included all the carols we’re doing,
because there are lots and they’re mostly well known.
I might add them later.

This is a single stanza from a long, long Latin hymn of praise
attributed (it’s not clear how rightly) to
St Bernard of Clairvaux;
it was written in the 11th or 12th century.
The translation set by Bairstow is by
Edward Caswall
(author of “See amid the winter’s snow”) and dates from 1848.
Above we see: Caswall’s translation; the Latin original; a more literal translation.

Apparently the setting “by Victoria” that we’re singing is very unlikely
actually to be by him. The one by Bairstow really is by Bairstow, though.

Jesu: in the Latin, this is not a vocative,
as you can tell from “eius” (his) later on. The comma after it
in M&P, therefore, is surely a mistake. (I expect Rutter was
thinking of Caswall’s translation!)

(Actually, there’s another possibility, which if correct would
kinda justify the comma: “Jesu” could be an interjection,
the sense being something like “Ah, Jesus! His sweet memory fills the
heart with joy”. I don’t think this is very likely.)

dans: yes, this really is Latin, though because of the
more familiar French word spelt the same way it doesn’t look much
like it! Present participle of the verb “to give”: do,
dare, dedi, datum.

vera cordis gaudia: the word order is a bit weird here – vera
qualifies gaudia, not cordis – so there’s no natural break in
the words and (if our conductor doesn’t say otherwise) there should probably
be no breaths anywhere in here apart from expressive ones on repeated words.

my breast: Caswall actually wrote “the breast”, which is
a better translation; the original author is describing what he thinks
is the general experience of Christians, rather than enjoying his own
feelings. Presumably Bairstow is using a bit of artistic licence here.

presence/praesentia: I think the author has in mind
mystical experience rather than heaven, but I’m not sure.

The text is the first four verses of Psalm 81. Batten and Byrd
have slightly different verses; above, Batten is on the left. I think
Byrd is using the
Geneva Bible (1587);
I haven’t found anything that
quite matches Batten’s text, but it somewhat resembles
Coverdale’s translation
of 1535 and the
Bishops’ Bible
of 1568. These both have
“merrily” rather than “joyfully”, which is interesting in view of
the footnote at the start of our edition of Batten’s piece.

make a cheerful noise / sing loud: the underlying
meaning is probably something like “shout loudly”. Enthusiasm rather
than elegance. (This should not necessarily apply to our performance
of these words.)

tabret/timbrel: an
instrument similar to the
tambourine, commonly used at celebrations of victory, banquets and
other such joyful-solemn occasions.

new moon ... time appointed ... feast day: It’s not
entirely clear whether this is describing one, two or three occasions,
nor exactly when they are. It doesn’t matter much.

a statute for Israel: perhaps it’s worth pointing out
that to the original author and audience this meant “us” rather
than “them”, as it were.

Yule: Originally a pagan winter festival. The origin of
the name is not clear, but apparently modern English “jolly” is
derived from it. The author of these words doesn’t appear to have
anything pagan in mind.

born in one morning: “on one particular morning”,
that is; the author is not expressing surprise that Jesus’s
birth didn’t take longer.

Innocentes: no, of course this isn’t Latin and should
not be sung as such. Refers to the victims of the
“Massacre of the Innocents”.

marter: martyr. (I think “one” doesn’t
have any meaning other than perhaps “person”; it’s
there to make up the syllable count and fix the rhyme.)

both in fere: “as equals”, I think. (A “fere”
is a companion, a peer, or a mate. Without “both”
I’d take it as meaning just “together”.)

seintes: saints.

Candelmesse:
Candlemas,
celebrating the occasion recorded in Luke’s gospel when
Mary brought Jesus to the temple at Jerusalem forty days after
his birth, and he was recognized by Simeon and Anna as the one
who would redeem Israel. The words attributed to Simeon on this
occasion form the Nunc dimittis.

Quene of bliss: I think the author is identifying
the feast of Candlemas with Mary, as he earlier identified that
of Yule (= Christmas) with Jesus.

makeles: matchless. (I am not sure whether
there are overtones of “mate-less”, but
I think not.)

To her son she ches: to be her son she chose.

al so stille ... as: just as quietly ... as. (I think.)

moder: mother.

There: equivalent to “where“, I think.

I have never been quite sure I understand this poem,
but I think the three “He came al so stille”
stanzas are all describing the same thing, namely the
conception of Jesus. (In particular, I don’t think
the stanza containing “There his moder lay”
is referring in any way to Mary’s death, although for
a long time I assumed it was because it just sounds
that way to the modern ear, or at least to mine.) Here’s
a link to some helpful
comments
from the Medieval Reading Group at Cambridge.

shot: yes, that’s a plural. (Having written which,
it occurs to me that it might be the plural of “Shah”
if that were a Hebrew word. For the avoidance of doubt, of course
there’s absolutely no chance that that’s the actual
meaning.)

wound ... sound: presumably these rhyme, and therefore
one of them has a pronunciation differing from the modern one.
Probably “wound” is pronounced as today. I’ve
no idea whether Graham will want us to make them rhyme or not.

The angels’ trumps alarum sound: the sentence
structure is a bit twisted here. “The trumpets of the angels
sound the call to arms.”

pight: pitched.

with joy: I wonder whether there’s a double
meaning here: first of all “joyfully”, of course,
but maybe also “by means of joy”. Probably not.

silly beasts In crib to shroud his head: you could punctuate this
with a comma after “beasts” or after “crib”. It
depends on whether you think “in crib” is describing Jesus or
the beasts. I have no idea which the author intended. Perhaps both. It
doesn’t matter much.

Prince: means, as more or less always at this time,
“king” rather than ”king’s son”.

plate: I think this means “silver tableware”
rather than “round thing for eating off”, though it comes
to the same thing here.

The punctuation in our copies is pretty strange. Specifically:
(1) I hope Britten has a very good reason for the emphatic break
after “iwis”, because it doesn’t make much sense
textually. (2) The full stop before “it is for man”
must surely be either a mistake or a wilful reinterpretation
of the text.

iwis: certainly, indeed. Usually actually means
“I need an extra couple of syllables here”. Here,
it qualifies the whole statement: “Truly, what a pleasure
it is ...”.

The corn springing: Surely the poet is not really
claiming to hear this; and perhaps it’s only the corn
that’s being described as “God’s purveyance
for sustenance”. In which case, you might do well to imagine
that the first sentence ends after “vale” rather
than after “springing”.

purveyance: provision.

than: then.

I don’t know whether it’s coincidence or design,
but the 6/8 time signature matches the structure of the poem:
it divides into two sets of six lines, each of which falls
(less definitely) into two groups of three. (Unless I’m
right about the restructuring I described above, in which case
it goes 5-4-3 which doesn’t fit the time signature at all.)

bounden in a bond: tied up in chains. (The author
is not suggesting that Adam lived for 4000 years; rather,
Adam is standing in for the whole human race, enslaved to sin
by Adam’s action until the coming of Christ.)

clerkes: clergy. (Their bok is of course the Bible.)

Ne: If not.

hevene: of heaven.

Ne hadde never our lady a-ben hevene quene: There
is an old Christian idea
that the fall of Adam, although it brought sin and death into the world,
was none the less a Good Thing overall because of the greater good it
enabled, namely the Incarnation and the redemption of the world.
The author of this carol, however, seems to think that sin and death
were worthwhile because they enabled Mary to become queen of heaven,
an audacious idea indeed.

Anonymous text from about 1300; Britten has modernized the spelling somewhat.

maris stella: cf. the Latin hymn (8th century or earlier)
Avemarisstella.
Why Mary was ever compared to a star of the sea,
though, I don’t know. I’ve seen the following two theories. (1) St Jerome wrote
that Mary’s name (in its Hebrew form “Miriam”) means “a drop from the sea” (a
barely possible etymology, I think) or, in Latin, maris stilla, and
someone misread or miscopied his words; (2) it’s an oblique reference to
1 Kings 18:41-45, the small cloud rising from the sea being (for some reason)
referred to as a star – the idea presumably being that Mary foreshadows Christ
as the cloud foreshadowed the long-awaited rain. I suspect #2 is a rationalization
that postdates the title.

puella: literally just “girl”, with no particular connotations
of virginity. (Which is rather appropriate, really, when you consider the
likely origins of the idea of the Virgin Birth via a mistranslation of a
Hebrew word which also just meant “young woman” – but I digress.) Anyway,
the meaning here is clearly “virgin” since it’s being contrasted
with parens.

see to me: presumably meaning “look at me” or “pay attention to me”,
although in modern English the meaning would be somewhat different.

pray thy son for me that I may come to thee: a single phrase, I think:
that is, “please ask your son to arrange that I will come to you”. I’d have
thought it would be more usual, theologically speaking, to ask Mary to
bring one to Jesus rather than the other way around, but these mediaeval
lyrics have a bit of a tendency to get their priorities backwards like this;
I’ve already mentioned the more famous example in
Adam lay ybounden. But, once again, I digress.

pia: An almost untranslatable word. Its
meanings
include “good”,
“dutiful” and “merciful”.

peccatrice ... genetrice: the rhyming words are clearly
intended to suggest a parallel between Eve and Mary: one who brought
sin into the world through her disobedience, and one who fixed it
through her obedience. (Compare with “illud Ave ... mutans Evae nomen”
in Ave maris stella, if you’re so inclined.). Translating
“genetrix” as “mother” is a bit unsatisfactory; the
meaning
is a bit more like “childbearer” or “birthgiver”.

the day / Salutis: single phrase: the day of salvation.
“Salus” more literally
means
“health” (and various other similar things such as
“safety”); but then, originally
“salvation” meant something like “making healthy”.

The well: compare, e.g., John 7:38. I don’t think any
pun on “well” meaning “healthy” is intended here, though I wouldn’t
place any large bet against it.

virtutis: I have to admit that I don’t see exactly how
this works syntactically. Perhaps “thee” at the end of the previous
line should really be “thy”: “the well springs out of your virtue”.
(I think the original source has “the”, but of course spellings
were rather more flexible in 1300.) Or it might mean &8220;the well of virtue”.
Either of these parsings makes nonsense of the full stop before Virtutis.
Or (though this seems far-fetched) virtutis might qualify the whole
preceding sentence: “the well springeth out of thee, by means of virtue”.
Incidentally, “virtus” has many
meanings
other than “virtue” (see below)
but here I think “virtue” really is the best translation.

flower of everything: that is, best and loveliest part
of The Whole Shebang.

queen of paradise / electa: “chosen (by God) to be queen
of paradise”.

Maid mild, mother es / effecta: I think there’s a contrast
being drawn along the following lines: Mary was by nature a maiden,
but then was made a mother by God. “Effecta” seems a terribly weak
ending for the poem, and I suspect the need to make the rhymes work
may have been in the driving seat here. If I were setting this poem,
I think I’d repeat the first verse at the end.

Apparently Britten wrote this one afternoon at school when he was
away from his classes because he was feeling ill. He would have been
16 years old. What with this and Walton’s Litany written at
the age of 15, it’s a humbling set of pieces we have this term.

I haven’t much to say about this, not least because it
says very little and what it does say is rather mysterious.
Perhaps the fair maid is Mary, perhaps not. I did find some
notes
on the carol, though various things about that web page make me
reluctant to trust it too completely.

veniet: the idea that God is not merely going to comfort
and help his people but come to them is not found in the
original text in Isaiah, but was added to make it into an Advent
liturgy.

pauperum: the translation in the Oxford Book of Tudor Anthems
(printed at the end of the piece) translates this as “humble”
rather than “poor”.
That’s fair enough, but “humble” is ambiguous. There is no suggestion here of the
virtue of humility.

orietur: this isn’t just a fancy way of saying
“come into being”; it plays on a whole bunch of associations in
Christian thought: rising in general, and sunrise in particular
(compare the English word “orient” and, remember, if you happen
to know them, those lines from George Herbert: "The sun arising
in the east, Though he give light and the East perfume, If they should
offer to contest With thy arising, they presume"), would
bring to mind both the Resurrection and the Second Coming.
And “rising” might suggest also that those “poor/humble people”
already mentioned are going to be elevated to the sort of
life they deserve; a sense of downtroddenness, and the hope
of future vindication, has always been a major feature of
both Jewish and Christian thought.

in diebus tuis: the OBTA translation turns this into
“in those days”, which simply isn’t what it says. (But if you take
the days in question to be those of the Second Coming, which is presumably what
the author had in mind – yes, this is another divergence between
Isaiah and the Advent liturgy – “your days” and “those days” both
convey basically the right meaning.

Byrd and Victoria have the same text – an antiphon for All Saint’s Day –
but Byrd apparently had more to say, and set some extra words from the
book of Revelation (whence also the second half of the antiphon itself)
and a bit of linking material. I have no idea whether the extended version is
original to Byrd; for what little it’s worth, I haven’t seen it anywhere
else.

stolis albis: white robes, a symbol of purity and perhaps also
of high status. This bit is from the book of Revelation; the people concerned
have “come out of great tribulation”, presumably by dying of it.

Agnum: Christ, the “Lamb of God”.

sequuntur agnum quocumque ierit: I am unable to read this without
thinking of “Mary had a little lamb”, although of course that is the other
way around. It’s natural to speculate that the ultimate origins of Mary’s
little lamb might lie in some such sacred text (Mary, after all...)
but no:
apparently
there really was a person, really called Mary, who really
brought a lamb to school one day, etc., and a visitor to the school saw the
resulting commotion and wrote some verses on the subject.
Or, then again, perhaps
not.
But, yet again, I digress.

quocumque/quocunque: the former (as in the Victoria)
appears to be the more correct spelling.

dicentes: actually, the author of Revelation 7 is quite clear
(for once) about who says the following words, and it isn’t the people
dressed in white robes. Never mind.

claritas: looks like it should mean “clarity”,
and indeed that is the original
meaning.
The evolution goes something like this: clarity,
clearness, brightness, splendour, glory, fame.

gratiarum actio: “gratia” has lots of other meanings besides
thanks; “actio” is a general word for any kind of doing; but in combination
the meaning is pretty clear. You might wonder whether the clumsy-seeming
construction here reflects some peculiarity in the underlying Greek
(at least, you might if you’re as ignorant as I am of how else it might
have been said in Latin); it turns out that the corresponding Greek
word is “eucharistia”, which one might have thought would mean something
much more specific...

virtus: no, this doesn’t really mean “virtue”. I’m sorry to
say that the original meaning was “manliness”, whence in the usual sexist
way it came to
denote
just about every kind of merit. The underlying
Greek word in Revelation 7:12, however, definitely means “power”.

in saecula saeculorum: a “saeculum”
is
a generation, a lifetime,
an age, etc.; presumably a saeculum saeculorum is something made up of ages
as an age is made up of years; hence a very long time indeed. So, at least,
I’ve always assumed. Incidentally, the conventional but mystifying
English translation “world without end” is mystifying because “world”
is there used with a meaning that’s long since dropped out of use.

in saecula saeculorum is a pretty direct translation of the
underlying Greek, which uses just the same sort of construction; that,
in turn, is taken straight from Daniel 7:18. (There is a lot of Daniel
in Revelation.) Thanks to Colin Bell for pointing out this connection
to me.

Gibbons actually wrote only the melody and bass of the setting
ascribed to him, and there is no reason to think he had Fletcher’s
poem in mind (or had even read it) when he wrote it. Further, I think
the editor of Hymns and songs of the church (the early hymnal
in which Gibbons’s hymn tunes with names like “Song 46” are found)
messed with this one between Gibbons’s composition and its publication.
So the association with Gibbons is really pretty
tenuous.
No matter; it’s a nice enough tune. Anyway, I was supposed to be writing about
the words, not the music.

The news and Prince of peace: that is: the news of peace
(the gospel) and the Prince of Peace (Jesus Christ). The feet in question
are presumably meant to be those of Jesus himself. Compare Isaiah 52:7,
Nahum 1:15 and Romans 10:15 (how beautiful [on the mountains] are the feet
of them that bring good news) and Luke 7:38 (Jesus’s feet being washed
by the tears of one of his admirers).

The punctuation of the bit about mercy and vengeance may not be perfectly clear.
I paraphrase: "My wet eyes, don’t stop begging for Jesus’s mercy, because my sin
continually cries for vengeance to be taken on it".
The poet is hoping for that cry not to be answered.

flood[s]: Fletcher wrote “floods”, and that’s what we have
in the kinda-sorta-Gibbons setting; Walton has “flood”, perhaps to reduce
the number of consonants required at the end of a quaver when breath
might be at a premium. Thanks, William!

The text is from Revelation 14. Brahms, obviously copying Howells,
also used it at the end of a liturgically unconventional requiem.

Even so saith the Spirit: there should really be a comma
after “Even so” – those words are part of what the Spirit allegedly
saith, not a description of the Spirit’s saying – but perhaps Howells
was deliberately changing the meaning a bit.

Howells truncates this passage in mid-sentence, not setting the
portion in square brackets above. The truncation
may perhaps make the words more appropriate, given that Howells
wrote his Requiem for his son Michael who died of polio at the
age of 9.

The poem is by Sir Thomas Browne; it’s
found
in his “Religio Medici”
(“A doctor’s religion”) of 1642. The version printed in the front of our
copies has a couple of punctuation errors at the ends of lines, which
I’ve repaired. I must confess that I greatly dislike this poem.

like to the day: I think this means “bother, I can’t think
of a better rhyme for away”.

Let not my sins ... eclipse ...: of course Browne isn’t
suggesting that his sins could extinguish God’s light,
merely that they could stop him seeing it.

Keep still in my horizon: I think “still” means
“continuingly” rather than “motionless” here.

to me The sun makes not the day, but thee: If indeed
Browne distinguished night from day by looking to see whether or not
God was there, this might explain why “the night” is “like unto
the day”. But I suspect that actually what this means is
“I want to say something that sounds pious now”.

my temples: no meaning of this word, literal or metaphorical,
seems to make very good sense of the text. The least bad ones seem
to me to be (1) the body as “temple of the Holy Spirit” (but then why
the plural?) and (2) part of the head (but why a part rather than the
whole? perhaps just because “temple” happens to be a holy-sounding
word). Maybe I’m missing something obvious.

watchful foes: it’s not clear to me whether he means
human or demonic ones; I think the latter.

Jacob’s temples: see Genesis 28. Asking to have
only that sort of dream seems a bit ambitious to me.

a holy trance: I don’t think “trance” here means anything
as specific or exotic as it would mean in modern English; the emphasis
is on “holy”, not on “trance”. (Despite what Leighton has written for
the basses at the end of his setting of these words.)

with an active vigour run My course: it’s a shame
that Leighton saw fit to insert a quaver rest after “run”, which
rather makes nonsense of the words. (Especially for A,T,B, who
have no break after “course”.)

let me try: “try” here means “test”. Browne wants
to take advantage of the resemblance between sleep and death,
and use his experience of sleeping to approach death with
tranquility.

or to wake or die: in modern English this would be
“whether to wake or die”.

that hour: that of resurrection. Incidentally, Leighton’s setting
omits the penultimate couplet: “These are my drowsie days, in vaine /
I doe now wake to sleepe againe.” The omission simplifies, so to speak,
the flow of the poem, but deprives the final couplet of some of its point.

The text is a 15th- or 16th-century
carol
which formed part of a
Coventry mystery play.
There is no extant manuscript copy,
and the copies we have are incomplete and of poor quality;
hence the way it begins in the middle (“O sisters too”), and
the divergences between Leighton’s version and the familiar
one from Carols for Choirs. Here’s a list of
those divergences (the version above is Leighton’s):

Some of the sentence structure is pretty contorted, so here
is a paraphrase which may help. I’ve omitted some by by lulla stuff.
“O sisters, what can we do to keep this poor child (for whom
we sing by by, etc.) alive today? // Today, King Herod ordered
his soldiers to kill all young children in his sight. // I am
full of woe on your behalf, poor child, and since your departure
I can no longer at any time bear to sing lullabies.” (I’ve assumed
that the child in question is Jesus, in which case “parting” does just
mean departure rather than death; but for all
I know it might be instead some one – or all – of the children
whose parents weren’t warned by angels to run away, and who therefore
got massacred.)

The text is from John’s gospel, although most likely it wasn’t
present in the original version of the gospel. I expect everyone is familiar
with the story, but here's a summary anyway: a woman is caught
“in the very act” of adultery, and dragged in front of Jesus
(presumably there was another person involved, but curiously he is not
on the scene). The law of Moses commanded, and I believe the law of
the Romans forbade, that she should be executed.
The point of this exercise was not justice but
point-scoring in an attempt to discredit Jesus by either damaging
his reputation for godliness or getting him in trouble
with the Romans. Jesus gave an ingenious answer:
go ahead and kill her, but the first stone must be thrown by someone
innocent of sin. One by one, the accusers slink off, leaving Jesus and
the woman alone. “What, have they all gone? Has no one condemned
you?” he asks (with a wry smile, I always imagine). No? Well, then,
off you go, but don't do it again.

mulier: Addressing someone as “woman”
seems awfully rude. Since Jesus is on record as addressing his
own mother in the same way and not getting any objections,
presumably it was less so at the time.

Nemo, domine: These are the woman's words (the rest
are Jesus's). Presumably the point of the crescendo as these
words are repeated is that it's gradually dawning on the woman
that she's escaped; we want a transition from subdued, to
pleasantly surprised, to exhilarated. (Though I suspect that, if the
incident really happened, she was never in much real danger.)

domine: I've translated this as “sir”,
although “Lord” is an obvious alternative. The
Greek word kurie could be used either way, and there's
no particular reason to think that the woman was a follower
(still less a worshipper) of Jesus.

amplius: I think this could mean either
“again” or “worse” (more literally
it just means “more”). I may be wrong about this,
but in any case MacMillan's setting of the words clearly
indicates that he intends “more” rather than
“again”.

The longer text here is a so-called laudes regiae,
traditionally used on Easter Sunday and at coronation services from roughly
the time of Charlemagne onwards. It is highly structured, though the deletions
we’ve made largely wreck the structure, and repays a bit of study.

Information on the laudes regiae:
some random person’s
blog
(but extremely informative);
Catholic Encyclopedia
(about liturgical acclamations more generally, but does have useful
information about the laudes regiae;
bits of a book
on the subject (warning: link leads to large PDF files of doubtful
legality and legibility).

vincit ... regnat ... imperat: to Christ are attributed,
successively, the status of a successful military commander; a king;
and an emperor.

supra ... animas: the word order of my translation above
is somewhat strained to bring it close to the Latin. More idiomatically:
“binding together souls across national boundaries”.

illum ... illum ... illum (lines 9–11):
unfortunately, the deletions that have been made
in our version of these laudes have made a bit of a mess
of the text. illum here refers back to the Pope (interestingly
named Benedict; I think it is coincidence that this is the name of
the present Pope), upon whom
blessings were invoked in the cantor’s previous (now deleted)
petition. We could fix this by replacing “illum” with “illam” (like
the bits we deleted immediately after the prayer for the ecclesia
sancta Dei.

Petrum, etc.: each set of petitionees (I’m sure there
should be a better word than that) is chosen appropriately for the
petition in question. Peter and Paul are invoked when praying for
the Pope (except that we are omitting that petition), patron saints
of the diocese when praying for the bishop and clergy (we are omitting
that whole section), and local patron saints when praying for civil
officials. (Perhaps we should invoke St Ivo in Hemingford Abbots,
and St Radegund in Jesus chapel – though in the latter case we’d
probably need to turn the text into a prayer for the college rather
than the civil authorities...

Exaudi, Christe (line 12): another casualty of our
editing. Each exaudi, Christe precedes a petition, but
petition after this one has been deleted.

magistratibus: actually a much more general term than
“magistrate” in modern English,
denoting
the whole range of civil offices, generally much more exalted positions than our magistracies.

illos: refers back to the magistratibus et concivibus,
not to the christianorum.

tempora bona: It is a pity that “having a good time” has
such inappropriate connotations in English. The meaning here is surely
more like “blessed” or “prosperous” than “enjoyable”.

Feliciter: again,
nearer
to “prosperously” or “with good fortune” than “happily”, really.

The words set in the first part of the piece
are by
LancelotAndrewes;
if you have read T S Eliot’s
“The journey of the Magi”
then you have read something by Andrewes, for the opening
(“A cold coming we had of it ...”)
is taken almost verbatim from one of his sermons.
If you have read any of the King James (“Authorized”) translation
of the Bible, you may well have read more of Andrewes, who was a
leading figure among its translators.

The words we have here are taken from a translation of his
“Private Devotions” (written in Latin and Greek; this passage
was in Greek) by one Alexander Whyte.
(This edition
begins with a biography of Andrewes, notable for its
hostility towards its subject: Andrewes, we are told, was an inept
writer, a mediocre preacher, and a political and theological sellout.)
This passage forms a part of Andrewes’s devotions for the first day
of the week, and looks back to the first day of creation in Genesis 1.

Rutter has taken a few liberties in his arrangement of both texts.
The versions I’ve given above follow Rutter.

Rutter pivots on the word “light” into a
hymn by
Johann Franck
(translated,
rather loosely, by
Catherine Winkworth).
As it happens, this was neither the last word of the Andrewes/Whyte text,
nor the first of the Franck/Winkworth;
Rutter has rearranged both to suit his purpose.
From the latter, he has chosen portions of the fifth and sixth verses.
I regret that the translation I’ve linked to only has three verses;
you can find fuller versions on the web, but mostly on sites that
want to bombard you with music and/or advertisements.

the sweetest man e’er knoweth: of course this means
“the sweetest joy that man has ever known”, not anything to do
with sweet men.

give us ... guest .. receive us: As you might surmise
from the failure of grammar here, the Franck/Winkworth original
has “me” rather than “us” in these lines. I suggest that we sing
“guests”, but of course the decision is not for me to make.

Although it is usual to describe this as a traditional Appalachian
carol, it would be truer to say that it was written by the singer and
folklorist John Jacob Niles,
on the basis of "three lines of verse,
a garbled fragment of melodic material – and a magnificent idea"
he had heard sung at an Appalachian revivalist meeting in 1933.

This carol,
probably of mediaeval origin and perhaps from a mystery play,
actually has no fewer than 11 verses recounting the
incarnation, life, death and resurrection of Jesus. I believe its
imagery of dancing was the inspiration for Sidney Carter’s famous
“Lord of the Dance”.

Tomorrow shall be: One should presumably imagine this
verse as being sung (unlike the rest) immediately before the
Incarnation.

my true love: the human race, or perhaps
more specifically the Church.

silly: Probably doesn’t mean quite what “silly”
does now. Depending on just when these words were written,
it’s probably somewhere in the vicinity of “innocent”, “harmless”,
“feeble”, “pathetic”.

lucis ante terminum: “lucis” is attached not to “Te”
but to “terminum”:
the prayer is being offered before the end of the day.

solita: nothing to do with only-ness – e.g., not “your mercy alone”;
it literally
means
something like “which I am used to”
or “which I am acquainted with”.
“Customary”, “usual”, “wonted”
or “habitual” might be good alternatives to
“familiar”, but they seem somehow too dismissive.

praesul ad custodiam: other versions of the text have
“praesul et custodiam”, in which case the meaning would be something like
“overseer and guard”. A
praesul
is someone responsible for others, either in the sense of “president”
or that of “protector”. Originally, it meant
more specifically the leader of the Sulii or Salii, a group of priests of
Mars.

fantasmata: a Greek plural form in Latin, presumably because
the word comes straight from Greek. Difficult to translate exactly
other than by “phantasms”, but clearly means “dreams” again. "Shades
of night" would be traditional (and occurs in at least one English
hymn clearly inspired by this one), but I at least never realised
that it didn’t just mean “darkness” until I read this text!
“Fantasies”, perhaps, but that’s a bit of a stretch.

hostem nostrum: presumably the devil.

ne polluantur corpora: yes, this really does mean what you
think it means.

“Ferial”, incidentally, means “proper to a weekday that is neither
a feast day nor a fast day”. (But we’re doing the festal version.)